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Thursday, July 26, 2012

Crusading to protect the bottom line

Anyone who's been following the money with regard to the Tea Party movement and the Koch brothers, and knows a bit of history, knows that the level of violence and hatred is not particularly unique to them. They aren't that much different from other movements that wanted to "Take Back America" except that they get a lot more attention from our corporate media than they deserve. But that's not new either. During the Great Depression (and before) most people didn't trust the corporate newspapers, they got their news from community Newspapers.

Frank Rich, blogging in the New York times back in 2010 noted that all the sturm and drang of the Tea Party was coming from:

...."the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are."http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html

All in all Bernie Sanders notes that there are some 22 individuals bankrolling the Tea Party. That doesn't include all the moguls who run corporations and don't want their names in Kleig lights and so give to ostensible "Charitable Organizations" that run ads that start out "Tell Obama" so that they can keep their deductibility with the IRS. These donations are secret because they don't want stockholder or customer revolts and they give to 501(c)3 organizations. And I note that there are 100's of articles on this subject but when I google it, only one comes up. So we are getting what our governors are willing to pay for.

Anyway the columnist notes:

"All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president."